The preparation of tissues for plant propagation, regeneration and transformation is time consuming and labor intensive, especially as it usually involves manual excision of transformable or culturable plant tissues. For example, in corn (Zea mays), individual immature embryos are typically removed manually to provide genetically-transformable explants. The manual excision of embryogenic tissues is laborious and risks ergonomic injury to the worker. Moreover, when larger amounts of transformable plant tissue are required for high-throughput transformation and plant production, more workers must be employed and trained to meet the increased demands. Additionally, there can be significant variability in the quality of plant tissues obtained, depending on the skill level, care, attentiveness, and fatigue of the individual workers. This tissue variability is problematic, as poor quality tissues negatively impact the efficiency of subsequent tissue culture, genetic transformation, and plant propagation. Thus, there is a need in the art for methods of preparing target plant tissues that are more rapid, reduce the overall ergonomic burden on workers, reduce the amount of workers needed to process the plant materials, and/or yield plant tissues that are of higher quality or more consistent quality than manually produced tissues.